


Walking the Long Road, Watching the Sky Fall

by crzy_wrtr10



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Light Dom/sub, Male Friendship, Medical Examination, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Procedures, Minor Spoilers for Moon Over Soho, Non-Sexual Submission, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Midnight Riot, Thomas is an Idiot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 03:10:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9579785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crzy_wrtr10/pseuds/crzy_wrtr10
Summary: Nightingale looked to his right and swayed unsteadily when the rest of his body couldn’t decide whether to follow suit or stay put. A hand touched his arm, and he looked first at the shoulder it was connected to, and then at Abdul’s concerned face.“Thomas?” Abdul repeated, his tone as gentle as it had been the first time Thomas had woken in ICU with a tube down his throat.“I – what?” He blinked.“I think you should lay down.”Nightingale's night of hospital observation inMoon Over Sohoand then some.





	1. Walking the Long Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AgarthanGuide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgarthanGuide/gifts).



> Hi small fandom! 
> 
> So, [AgarthanGuide](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AgarthanGuide/pseuds/AgarthanGuide) recommended me the _Rivers of London_ series this summer, and I fell absolutely in love with it. She, as always, was a cheerleader of this fic. 
> 
> A point or two I want to make.
> 
> I have this headcanon that Abdul is a gentle dom and Thomas submits to him in a non-sexual manner. (Nightingale is wound tighter than an eight day clock, but he trusts Abdul completely, and I that's what you'll see here. I hope.)
> 
> I am not a medical professional. If I get something wrong on that aspect, just let me know and I'll do my best to fix it. 
> 
> **Warning: If you don't like hospitals and needles and things pertaining to medical equipment, then I'd either skip this or proceed with caution. There's no blood or gore or vomit or bodily fluids, but it's primarily in a hospital setting, and Thomas gets pretty sick.**
> 
> Further notes on the oxymoron of this being both canon compliant and not canon compliant are at the end of the first chapter.
> 
> Title taken from Panic! At the Disco's "Death of a Bachelor"

“Thomas? Thomas.”

He resisted the urge to scrub a hand over his face.

“ _Thomas_.”

Nightingale looked to his right and swayed unsteadily when the rest of his body couldn’t decide whether to follow suit or stay put. A hand touched his arm, and he looked first at the shoulder it was connected to, and then at Abdul’s concerned face.

“Thomas?” Abdul repeated, his tone as gentle as it had been the first time Thomas had woken in ICU with a tube down his throat.

“I – what?” He blinked.

“I think you should lay down.”

Thomas’s head swiveled around to look at Peter and Abdul’s hand slid from his arm down to his wrist. Strong, thin fingers wrapped around his overly warm skin and squeezed hard enough to bring his attention back around.

He let Abdul lead him to another examination area separated from Peter’s by a curtain and sit him on the bed. He shrugged out of his suit jacket, and undid his shirt cuffs while Abdul loosened his tie and pulled it over his head.

“Lie back, Thomas,” Abdul murmured. “Relax." 

Thomas blinked slowly. Abdul popped the top two buttons on his shirt, and brushed the backs of his fingers along Thomas’s neck to check for fever. Still hot, but not alarmingly so. His next step was to tug Thomas’s oxfords off. He popped his head around the curtain to flag a passing nurse for both a heated blanket and a blood draw kit.

The heated blanket arrived first, and he draped it from Thomas’s toes to his neck. Thomas sighed, snuffled, and tried to coordinate his limbs enough to turn onto his side. 

“No.” Abdul, wary of Thomas’s right shoulder – the one closest to him – gently pushed him flat on his back again. “Stay flat for me, please.”

He fought briefly against Abdul’s hold and rallied a little. “Abdul?” He rolled his head on the pillow to look at the curtain dividing him from Peter. “Peter?”

“He’s doing just fine,” he said quietly. He shifted his hand and rubbed slow, reassuring circles on Thomas’s collarbone. “He’s got some bumps and some bruises. It’s you I’m concerned about.” 

“’M’fine.” _There_ was the stubborn glint in Thomas’s eyes Abdul was used to seeing.

“Thomas,” he said with a sigh, “you would say you were fine even if you carried your head under your arm.”

Thomas smiled enough to show his dimples, and it highlighted the fever spots in his pale cheeks. “’Tis but a flesh wound.”

A nurse came unobtrusively around the curtain with a blood draw kit. Abdul nodded to her, and unearthed Thomas’s arm from beneath the blanket. His other hand he kept on Thomas’s chest as a reminder for him to stay flat.

“Do the regular draw, and go ahead a put an IV port in, please,” Abdul asked. He watched Thomas fight to keep his eyelids open. “You told me you would take it easy. There wouldn’t be any reason to put you on medical leave because you promised you would rest.” Whether he meant to or not, Abdul’s voice slipped into the tone he only used on those rare occasions when Thomas needed to get out of his head and hand over control to someone he trusted.

Thomas rubbed the back of his head against the pillow. It made his hair resemble a bird’s nest rather than its usual careful styling, and he flinched when the nurse slid the needle into his arm.

“This isn’t resting, Thomas,” he continued. “You need to rest to heal.”

The nurse finished applying the plastic bandage to keep the IV port in place in the crook of Thomas’s elbow, and released the tourniquet. “I’ll get these to the lab, and you should have you results shortly, doctor.”

“Thank you.” Abdul waited until she was gone around the curtain again to sit on the bed by Thomas’s hip. His hand resumed the circles on Thomas’s left upper chest. “I’ll wait until your blood work comes back, but I don’t like how warm you are.” His shoulders stiffened, and he looked Thomas in the eye.

Or he tried to. With more color in his cheeks than Abdul could contribute to fever, Thomas found the pain level poster on the wall to his right more fascinating.

“Did you finish your course of antibiotics?” This time he used the tone that promised retribution if Thomas even so much as _tried_ to lie.

Thomas bit his lip and pulled his knees toward his chest.

“ _Thomas_.”

“No,” he whispered. “I – three days.”

“You had three days left or you took three days worth of medication?”

He finally looked at Abdul, more outright miserable than he ever let anyone else see. “Took three days.”

Abdul rubbed more gentle circles against Thomas’s subtly hitching chest. “Breathe. It’s alright. It’s alright.”

Thomas relaxed with a flinch and a murmur. This was exactly what Abdul had done when he’d woken for the first time in ICU with wires and tubes everywhere, completely disoriented. Abdul had stroked his fingers over Thomas’s collarbone where it was exposed by his hospital gown, well away from the bandages on his right shoulder and chest, and told him to relax, let the vent breathe for him.

“I want to put you on some stronger antibiotics and get ahead of this a little bit more,” Abdul said. “I’m going to admit you for you tonight, okay?”

He nodded tiredly.

Abdul stood, and popped his head around the curtain to inform Peter he was going to keep Thomas overnight for observation. When he came back, Thomas had tried to rouse himself a little more though he looked to be valiantly fighting a losing battle. He’d heaved himself upright and swung his legs over the side of the bed, but that seemed to be about as far as he’d gotten, the blanket tangled hopelessly around him.

“Let me do all the heavy lifting,” he murmured, unwinding the blanket from around Thomas’s chest. “Your body needs rest in order to heal properly. I know you know this.”

“S’too much to do.” Thomas blinked, hands in his lap as Abdul divested him of vest and shirt.

“And you can’t do any of it if you’re back in the hospital.” He piled the rest of Thomas’s suit neatly on the nearby rolling table, and set his socks and tie on top. He put the ear tips in his ear and warmed the bell of the stethoscope between his palms before pressing it to Thomas’s chest. “Deep breath.”

Thomas obliged, and Abdul listened to the slight wheeze in his lungs. It was roughly the same as what he’d heard that day when he’d first put Thomas on antibiotics, and he frowned. He hadn’t backslid, but he hadn’t progressed forward, either.

Abdul looped his stethoscope around his neck once more, and, rather than make Thomas move – which, from the look on his face, seemed to be the _last_ thing he wanted to do at the moment – he went around to the other side of the bed in order to take a look at how he was healing.

The skin around the still-healing wound was inflamed and hot. Again, nothing to warrant serious concern, but enough that, if left alone, would worsen into a cause for serious concern.

“What’s your pain level, scale of one to ten?” Abdul asked. “Be honest with me.”

“Four.”

“Thomas.”

The shoulders in front of him hitched with a sigh. “Six.”

Abdul came around in front of him again and slipped his hands into his lab coat pockets.

“Abdul?” Thomas rested his hands loosely in his lap. “I trust you.”

Which was Thomas’s way of asking if Abdul could take care of _everything_ for a while.

“Thank you for trusting me.” He took his hands out of his pockets, and pushed some of Thomas’s hair off his damp forehead. “Lay back for me again? However you want,” he added when Thomas blinked blankly at him.

He curled partially on his left side and Abdul covered him once more with the blanket.

“Stay relaxed, okay? I’ll go find you some painkillers, Tatiana will help me get you checked back in as a patient, and we’ll find you a bed upstairs.”

Thomas stuck one hand outside the blanket in a brief wave of acknowledgement.

Abdul was gone seven minutes (he’d timed it) and came back to find Thomas sleeping fitfully. He draped another blanket over top of him, and pushed his hair back off his forehead. Thomas always looked so vulnerable in his sleep.

Slowly, because he didn’t want to wake him, Abdul fished among the blankets for one of Thomas’s wrists. He found the left one, and clipped the hospital ID bracelet around it, rubbing his thumb over Thomas’s knuckles when he stirred. The touch was enough to send him temporarily back under.

“Doctor Walid.”

He looked over to see Tatiana with one of the rolling machines they used to register patients. She tapped a few keys on the laptop hooked to it, and kept her voice low as she asked, “Is this Thomas Nightingale?”

“This is.” He hung the saline bag on the hook at the head of the bed and realized he’d have to peel back the blankets to find the IV port. He rattled off Thomas’s birthday – the one meant to make him in his early forties – and eased the covers back. Abdul straightened Thomas’s arm, snapped on some gloves, wiped the port connector with a disinfectant wipe, and set up the saline drip.

Thomas’s eyes opened to half mast.

“It’s only me. Go back to sleep.” Abdul tucked the blankets around him again as Thomas followed his request.

“Says here he was admitted for a – a _gunshot wound_?”

“He works for the Met.”

“Ah.”

They’d just finished getting him registered again when they got word from upstairs of which room they were going to put him in. There would also be a chart up there, as well as the stronger antibiotics Abdul wanted to start him on.

Thomas blinked awake in the elevator and reached through the railings on the bed for any part of Abdul he could conceivably snag. He wound up with his fingertips in the man’s lab coat pockets, which Abdul then had to get him to let go of so he could hold his cold hand.

“He doesn’t do well in hospitals,” Abdul said quietly as Tiana pushed the bed from the elevator.

“Not a lot of people do.” She stopped by an open door. “He’s going to have to walk for this.”

Abdul slipped socks with plastic grips on the bottom onto Thomas’s feet, and let him stay temporarily wrapped in his blankets for the short trek from one bed to the other, Tiana holding him by the arm with one hand and carrying his IV bag in the other.

He sat on the edge of his new bed in his underwear, and was otherwise silent as they put him in a hospital gown, hooked him to a heart monitor, clipped the pulse ox monitor on his finger, and took an initial set of vitals.

“Almost done, Thomas,” he murmured, warming the bell of his stethoscope between his palms again. “Deep breath for me again.”

Thomas obliged.

Tiana came back from the nurse’s station with two solution bags. She snapped on a pair of gloves, disinfected connection ports, and fiddled with the drip speed.

“The antibiotic is a lot stronger than the one I prescribed to you the other day. Sleep, Thomas. It’s going to be the best thing for you.” He helped Thomas get comfortable on his side, propping extra pillows behind his tender right shoulder.

Tiana draped new, warm blankets over him.

“Painkiller,” Abdul explained once he’d snapped on a pair of gloves to inject something into Thomas’s IV. “Should take the hurt out of that shoulder.”

“S’warm,” Thomas murmured.

“Feel better, Thomas,” Tiana said, patting his lower leg.

Once she was gone, Abdul rubbed his fingertips along Thomas’s collarbone through his many layers. He went droopy-eyed and slack-jawed, due, most likely, to a combination of both the drugs and the touch.

“Pain better?” Abdul murmured.

“Uh huh.” He burrowed his cheek into the pillow and slurred out, “Pet’r?”

“Was released and went home. Nothing but bumps and bruises.” He smiled softly and, keeping his movements gentle, tucked the blankets more securely up around Thomas’s injured shoulder. He had to switch which hand still rubbed circles on his chest in order to drape the remote with the call button over the railing where Thomas could get to it easily in case of emergency.

Not that the stubborn fool would use it, but Abdul felt better knowing he had the option.

“Close your – don’t fight this, Thomas – close your eyes.” He switched hands again in order to stroke soft brown hair away from Thomas’s temple and forehead. Repetitive motion and gentle touches, he’d learned quickly, were Thomas’s undoing. He trusted Abdul completely – had for years – and Abdul wasn’t going to abuse that trust in any way, shape, or form when it came to the permitted physicality between them.

“Sleep is the best thing you can do right now,” he repeated. “Let the antibiotics do their job.”

Thomas nodded, his breathing deepening. Abdul checked his oxygen stat on the monitor, and saw it remained normal.

“I’m going to go back to my office and finish a few things and then I’ll be back. Be good for the nurses who check on you. It’s best if you sleep.”

“’Kay,” he murmured. He readjusted his legs, and Abdul knew he’d finally dropped off into sleep.

He made sure the IV lines ran clear, double checked again that Thomas was tucked in well – he got cold easily when he was ill, and that didn’t end nicely for anyone – and retreated from the bed. Dimming the lights, he shoved his hands in his lab coat pockets and stopped by the nurse’s station desk in order to ask them to page him immediately if anything happened while he was gone.

And with that, he went back down to his office.

 

The last time he’d ached this much he’d gone toe to toe with a couple of Panzer tanks after being shot. That had been a literal lifetime ago, and he’d not expected to feel that bloody _awful_ ever again. It had, after all, been World War II at the time. 

He wrinkled his dry nose, and shuffled a hand up to swipe at whatever irritated it only to have his wrist grabbed before it could get halfway there.

“Leave that alone, Thomas.”

He peeled his eyelids apart to find Abdul leaning over the bedrail and positioning his arm against his chest.

“Your stats dipped, and we’ve put you on oxygen,” Abdul explained. “How do you feel?”

“Awful,” Thomas rasped.

Abdul set aside the papers he’d been reading onto the rolling table next to him, and picked up a cup. It turned out to contain ice chips, and Thomas didn’t object when Abdul spooned some into his mouth. He let them melt, grateful for the moisture.

“I’d like to check your shoulder.” Abdul gave him another spoonful of ice chips, then stood. “Where’s your pain at, scale of one to ten?”

“Doesn’t hurt,” Thomas slurred. He shivered as his back was uncovered and the hospital gown pushed aside. Cool fingers touched his hot skin, and he brought his legs further toward his chest, whacking an ankle off the metal bed rail.

“Stay still, please.”

He didn’t have energy to turn his head to look at Abdul, and he relaxed as best he could. Something round and cool touched his back.

“Deep breath, Thomas.”

He breathed deeply so Abdul could listen to his lungs, and shuffled his cheek against the pillow. It changed the angle he could look around the room at, and he spotted his IV bags. One was nearly empty, but the other, with the orange label, was only about a quarter gone. He pawed at the blankets until he could see the setup in the crook of his elbow and frowned at it.

“You’re fine,” Abdul murmured, rearranging hospital gown and blankets to cover Thomas’s back again. He smoothed his fingertips back and forth across the nape of his neck, and he deflated like a leaky balloon. “Do you want another pillow?”

Thomas shifted restlessly, fingers twitching against the mattress. Slowly, he breathed out, “Yes.”

Abdul left him briefly, and when he returned, Thomas let him lift his arm to slot the pillow in against his chest. He curled his arms around it with a sigh, and Abdul settled all his blankets again, ensured he was warm enough. His lips twitched into an approximation of a smile, his eyes closing as Abdul touched him lightly, tenderly, on the bridge of his nose, his cheekbones, and the curve of his ear.

This time, Thomas didn’t fight sleep when it came for him.

 

Abdul knew there were a number of reasons Thomas avoided any sort of heavy medication like the plague. One of them was that, according to Thomas, his brain felt like it was _swimming through pine pitch_ when he was medicated. His reflexes were dulled, and there should have been a _do not attempt magic_ to go with the _do not operate heavy machinery_ warning on the prescription bottles.

He’d been witness to one time when, under painkillers for a broken arm, Thomas had tried simple magic and accidentally set his bedroom curtains on fire. 

The other reason was that it gave him hellacious nightmares featuring the very worst of his PTSD and most likely brought on by the same _swimming through pine pitch_ analogy.

The best Abdul could hope for was for Thomas to be exhausted enough to sleep deeply and dreamlessly. Which, up until about half an hour before midnight, he had been.

Thomas gave a full body jerk that was hard enough to rattle the entire bed. Abdul looked up from his Kindle. The heart monitor continued to beep slowly, though Thomas’s breathing had increased slightly.

He shuddered again. Abdul set his Kindle on the rolling tray stand and stood.

The monitors picked up speed.

“Shite,” he muttered. “Never do anything by halves, do you.” He gripped one of Thomas’s wrists hard and, mindful of his tender shoulder, spread his other hand over the side of his head, fingers buried in the soft hair at the back. He made sure not to be covering his ear, and leaned in.

“It’s Abdul. You’ve got a chest infection, you’re in the hospital. You’re going to be fine. This is just a nightmare,” he said into Thomas’s upturned ear. “You’re going to fine, I’m right here.”

Thomas hiccupped, the frown in his forehead indicative that he was still caught in whatever hellhole his mind had dumped him into.

“It’s Abdul. You’re in the hospital. You’re going to be fine, but I need you wake up for me, Thomas.”

He brought his legs further toward his chest.

“Thomas. Thomas, _wake up._ ”

Thomas came awake with a sound somewhere between a gag and a sob, and tried to pop up into a sitting position. Abdul held him gently but firmly while he got his bearings. He checked the monitor – the numbers began to settle. Below him, Thomas hiccupped again.

He carded his fingers through Thomas’s hair. “You’re alright. You’re fine. I’m right here.” There was a tug on his lab coat, and he looked down briefly to see Thomas had reached through the gaps in the bedrail and clutched a handful of the white fabric.

“Abdul?”

“That’s me,” he said cheerfully, though he kept his voice down.

“Hospi’l?”

“You betcha.”

“H’w bad?”

He straightened, still keeping one hand on the side of Thomas’s head, now stroking his thumb over his upturned cheekbone. “You didn’t take your antibiotics course, so your chest infection from getting shot didn’t get better.”

“Oh.” Thomas relaxed, though he had yet to let go of the lab coat. “Oops.”

 _Ooops, indeed, Thomas._ “You’re going to be here at least overnight.”

“Th’n home?”

“If your stats and blood work look good, then yes, you can go home in the morning.”

He took a deep breath and mashed his face further into the pillow. Abdul stayed where he was until he was certain Thomas had dropped off again, then fed his limp arm back through the bed railing. Once he had Thomas tucked back in, he retreated back to the hard plastic chair and picked up his Kindle again.


	2. Watching the Sky Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things go downhill rather rapidly, and Thomas has some visitors - both expected and decidedly unexpected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the non canon compliant part of the fic. 
> 
> Enjoy. :)

Sometime around morning shift change, Thomas finally fell into an exhausted sleep. He didn’t move when Abdul – who’d caught about four or five hours of sleep in his office – moved his blankets and shifted him around to get at a vein for the nurse to draw blood from. From the warmth of his skin and his temperature from the last round of vitals that had been taken, Thomas was somewhere between _holding steady_ and backsliding.

Neither of those was what Abdul had hoped to see.

IV bags were changed out. Lab results came back. Abdul frowned at the paperwork in his hands, and looked at Thomas with a sigh.

“Doctor Walid?”

He looked over at Juliet. “Call upstairs and see if they’ve got room in the step-down unit. I don’t like his numbers.” The antibiotics hadn’t made as big a dent as he’d have liked.

“If they do, would you like me to go ahead and start the transfer paperwork?”

“Just for the unit. I’ll handle everything else. Thank you.” Abdul ran a hand over her face when she left. “Nothing’s ever easy with you, is it.”

Thomas slept on, momentarily blissfully unaware.

 

He woke up enough around midmorning to have Abdul help him to the bathroom, the IV pole trailing along behind him. He climbed tiredly back into bed when he was done, propped against the pillows, and blinked sluggishly at Abdul.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a Panzer and had my head filled with pine pitch.” Thomas rubbed his arm near the clear plastic bandage holding his IV needle in.

“Sounds about right.” Abdul dragged the hard plastic chair closer to the side of the bed. “I’m going to move you upstairs to the step-down unit. I don’t like how your numbers look and your fever’s gone up.”

He burrowed under his blankets with a shiver. “How’s Peter?”

“Seems to be right as rain today. He’s going to stop by in the afternoon.”

“Oh.”

“Can you stay awake a little longer for me? Juliet’s going to come back with wheelchair so we can move you.”

Thomas shifted. “I have to be awake for this one?”

“I’d prefer it.”

He blinked, threading his hand through the bedrail. Abdul met him halfway and let Thomas tangle his fingers in his lab coat sleeve.

“I’ll try,” Thomas murmured.

Abdul curled his fingers around his wrist, Thomas’s skin overly warm. “That’s all I’m asking for.”

“Hey, gentlemen,” Juliet said by way of both warning and greeting, coming through the door with the wheelchair. “Good to see you awake, Mr. Nightingale.”

He smiled tiredly and raised his free hand in a facsimile of a wave.

“They’re all set upstairs and waiting for your arrival.” She grinned.

“Well,” Thomas said, pushing himself upright as Abdul lowered the side rail, “I do try to be punctual.”

There was a whopping three steps between him and the wheelchair, and it felt more like trying to cross the Thames in a rowboat during a thunderstorm. He wobbled upright, Abdul’s hand hovering near his elbow, and he shuffled forward on his gray hospital socks. Holding his hospital gown closed in the back – he had his boxer briefs on, but no desire to show anyone the expanse of his bare back unless he had to for medical purposes – he dropped as gently into the wheelchair as he could manage. It still jarred, and a deep ache radiated from his right shoulder outward.

Abdul hung his IVs on the stand attached to the wheelchair, and Juliet tucked his blankets around his legs. Thomas rested his hands in his lap with a small sigh and did his best to smile up at Juliet.

“Aren’t you a charmer,” she murmured.

With as much dignity as he could manage, Thomas was wheeled from one hospital room to another.

By the time they got upstairs and had him settled again, there was a semi-permanent wince around Thomas’s eyes. When Juliet left with the wheelchair again, he slumped against the pillows, eyes half-open.

“You should go back to sleep,” Abdul said quietly.

Whatever Thomas said was lost among his blankets and pillows, but Abdul could have sworn it was a petulant, “Don’t wanna.” He smiled, and settled again in the hard plastic chair that seemed to be in every hospital room on the planet.

 

Peter and Beverley arrived more toward early evening than afternoon. Abdul had gone down to his office to make sure everything else was still order, and came back to find the pair of them having a hurried conversation in whispers while Thomas slept on, oblivious to the hushed commotion.

On the rolling tray table was a medium-sized glass bowl of water with several blue water lilies floating serenely in it. There was a small card next to it, and that seemed to be the center of the discussion between Beverley and Peter.

“Everything alright?” Abdul asked quietly.

The pair of them turned together; Peter snagged the note and they retreated to the foot of the bed. Abdul looked around them to verify that Thomas wasn’t too far into his next round of antibiotics = mildly stronger than his first set – and was still deathly pale, his cheeks red with fever.

“I just want to know what this means,” Peter hissed, waving the card. “If it’s good or bad or what.”

Abdul held his hand out for it. It was good cardstock, the script was neat, and it said only _–M. Thames_.

“How does she know he’s here?” Peter asked.

Beverley gave him a _look_. “Do you seriously want me to answer that?”

“No.” He took the card back. “But does this mean she knows he’s weak?”

“Considering the extent of the raging infection he’s got,” Abdul said, “he’s in surprisingly good shape.”

“I thought everything was _fixed_ ,” Peter hissed.

“And it is, you idiot.” Beverley snatched the card from him and set it back on the rolling tray table by the bowl. She gently spun one of the lilies, and glanced at Thomas for a long moment before coming back over. “What it means is that she’s _allowing_ him to be weak this time.”

“The man isn’t on his deathbed, and won’t be, if I have anything to say about it.” Abdul raised his eyebrows at the pair of them. “I don’t particularly care about the politics. I care that I’m struggling to keep his fever under control and if he doesn’t show improvement in the next twelve to twenty-four hours, then I’m going to have to put him back in ICU and break out just about every heavy weapon in my arsenal.”

Peter looked as though he were mulling this over intensely. “He came through surgery fine, didn’t he?”

“Flying colors.” Abdul shoved his hands in his lab coat pockets. “Was well on the mend until he was released from the hospital and instead of resting like he should have been, was off doing Allah knows what in the name of police work.” He was satisfied Peter had the good grace to wince. “It seems the infection is the thing he can’t shake.”

“Has he been sick like this before?” She looked between the two of them.

Abdul shook his head. “As far as I know, no. Not unless you count…” he trailed off, his eyes flicking toward Thomas.

“The last time he got shot,” Peter finished for him. “How much as medicine advanced since then? I’m surprised his immune system is as good as it is.”

“Do you think it’s his body, the drugs, or both?” Abdul asked, catching on to water Peter implied.

“Probably a combination of both.” He shrugged. “He hasn’t been through anything like this since then – except maybe a cold or two, I’m guessing – but this is different. It’s injury and illness.”

“One generally tries to follow the other.” Abdul sighed, and scrubbed a hand through his ginger hair. “The plan right now is to keep him comfortable, hydrated, and out of the ICU. He’s going to fight it, but the more rest he gets right now, the better off he’s going to be.”

Peter pulled a paperback from his jacket pocket. “For when he feels better.” He stepped around Beverley and Abdul and placed it on the rolling tray table next to the bowl of water lilies. “Not quite his usual reading material, but I think you’d thump him over the head if he tried reading anything in Latin right now.”

Abdul chuckled. “You are absolutely correct about that.”

Beverley snorted, and leaned against the windowsill. Abdul noted she wasn’t far enough down the bed to be directly behind Thomas’s shoulders and head, and he knew she’d done it deliberately – he wasn’t so far gone that someone behind him while he was so vulnerable wouldn’t wake him.

Some instincts couldn’t be overridden.

_Which, perhaps, is what this is_ , he thought as he sank once more into the hard plastic chair by Thomas’s bedside. Peter leaned against the wall by the foot of the bed, with a good view of the door, and Beverley had Thomas’s back covered.

Thomas surfaced briefly, brought to consciousness by the sound of lowered voices and occasional soft laughter, and was just as quickly lulled back to sleep by it.

 

His fever hovered at 39.5 C. A nasal cannula sat above his upper lip and the head of the bed was raised in a combined effort to help his breathing. His hair was a tangled mess on his pillow except for where it stuck to his sweaty forehead, and he’d been reduced to one blanket in an effort to cool him down. It covered him from the waist down, the top of his hospital gown loose around his collarbones. The leads of the heart monitor where the adhesive pads were stuck to his bare chest were visible, and his hands rested limply in his lap.

When he slept it was fitful, and more often than not he stared over at Abdul with heavy-lidded eyes.

Abdul had broke out the heavy duty antibiotics after Beverley and Peter had left earlier, and he’d given Thomas another round of painkillers to take the edge off both his shoulder and the general fever ache in his joints.

Thomas’s eyes were closed. Abdul wasn’t sure if he was sleeping or just couldn’t keep them open anymore.

He leaned back in his chair and glanced at his watch. It was going on midnight and the hospital was quiet.

The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He sat up carefully, and listened for any of the thousands of little ambient noises heard in all hospitals in the hallway.

Silence.

His head whipped around to the monitors that had kept steady track of Thomas’s heart rate since he’d been readmitted to the hospital. The readout was frozen. He looked down at Thomas – who’s eyes were open, if hazy – and then back at the monitor.

“I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, Abdul,” Thomas whispered. “I’m still here.” With visible effort, he rolled his head toward the door.

Abdul stood, and wondered if there might be anything he could use for a weapon nearby. If it was something Folly related, well, this might be the end of him but he’d go down swinging. Whatever it was that was coming wasn’t going to have free access to the man in the hospital bed.

Mama Thames rounded the corner of Thomas’s hospital room with the grace and poise of royalty.

Thomas shifted as much as he could – which wasn’t much, and nearly had him panting with effort – and she sat gently, though regally, by his thigh.

Abdul fell back into his chair with a soft thump.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” she said, looking at Abdul. “But it isn’t every day that one sees the Nightingale as human as he really is.”

Thomas gave her a ghost of a smile, and the barest hint of a dimple. He didn’t flinch when she reached out, cupping his cheek with a hand as cool as river water, and he sighed quietly in relief.

“You are in quite a state, Thomas,” she murmured. She trailed the backs of her fingers down the sweat-slick skin of his neck to his clavicle, and followed the line of bone to her left. He whined in the back of his throat, eyes closed; she shushed him softly, and rubbed small circles over where his exit wound would have been should he have had one.

He stared at her, slack=jawed, completely at her mercy and they all knew it.

“You make an easy target in here,” she continued. “I won’t take advantage of it, but there are those who would to see the Nightingale dead and the Folly in ruins. No, no, stay as you are,” she added when he tensed. “Relax. We have agreements, you and I, and there are many more who have other such agreements with you. It is in the best interest of everyone, for the moment, to continue to have those agreements.”

Thomas swallowed thickly, and croaked. “Not dead.”

She laughed quietly, and it sounded like water lapping gently against the shore on a spring afternoon. “No, you’re not. Despite someone’s best efforts and, most likely, your own stupidity.”

His smile twitched wider.

“You need to rest, boy. Follow your doctors orders and rest and heal.” Mama Thames rested her palm against the right side of his chest; he sagged bonelessly into the pillows behind him, expression slack with ache-free relief. It would be only temporary, of course, but it might allow him to get some real sleep. “You will not be harmed here.”

He blinked sluggishly, and rubbed his cheek against his good shoulder. The words were more air than sound, but he managed a tiny, “Thank you…the lilies.”

Mama Thames stood, and cupped his cheek again. “Think nothing of it. It’s not an obligation. Now, be a good boy and go to sleep.” She leaned in and brushed a kiss to his his fever-hot forehead. When she straightened, she rounded on a wide-eyed Abdul who sat stock-still and stunned in the chair.

“I meant what I told him,” she said, an undercurrent of swift water in her tone. “He will not be harmed here. You will continue to care for him?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, well aware the last part hadn’t been a question, but rather a statement.

She patted him gently on the cheek, and with a smile and a, “Have a good evening, Dr. Walid,” she was gone around the corner.

It was like someone had turned the sound up on the world again. The soft hum of voices at the nurse’s station filtered through the door, and there was the quiet beeping of Thomas’s heart monitor to his right.

Abdul was out of the chair and leaning over Thomas in seconds. He was still hot, though the crease in his forehead had smoothed out and he looked for all the world like he was finally sleeping soundly.

He eased back into the chair, ran a hand through his hair, and let out a deep breath that seemed to come from his toes. He glanced at the water lilies. _Good evening, indeed._

 

Thomas hovered on the edge of going back into the ICU for almost another twenty-four hours, until his fever broke sometime around three in the morning. He jerked awake with a shiver, exhausted to his very bones, and shifted until he could curl up on his side with a pillow under his chest. He fell back asleep with the blanket pulled haphazardly up around his shoulder and a hand hanging off the bed.

Abdul found him that way when he came to check on him shortly after shift change, delighted to find Thomas’s forehead was no longer hot enough to fry an egg on. He twitched, and Abdul looked down to find gray eyes – clear and unmuzzy for the first time in days – looking up at him.

“Gave us all a bit of a scare, Thomas,” he said quietly.

“It wasn’t my intention to do so.”

“It usually never is.” He sat down in the damn hard plastic chair and waited.

Thomas moved a leg and his foot came free of the blanket. He hastily snatched it back under and asked, “When can I go home?”

Did the man want the short answer or the long answer? Abdul took pity on him. “When I say you can.” The eye-roll response was one of Thomas’s better ones. “If you can hit some bench marks today – fluids by mouth and temperature stays down – then maybe you can go later this evening. But I’d rather be sure that you won’t wind up back here quite so soon.”

There was a brief flash of mutiny in Thomas’s eye, and Abdul glared back, eyebrows raised. Thomas, sensibly, backed down.

Abdul looked at the rolling tray table and saw the paperback Peter had brought sitting next to the bowl of lilies. He picked it up. “If you get bored, you can always read.”

Thomas brightened a bit, and took the book when Abdul held it out to him. It was a dog-eared, very well-loved copy of _The Color of Magic_ , and he didn’t bother to fight the smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Peter was here?”

“And Beverley.” He leaned forward. “Do you…remember your other visitor?”

He tucked the paperback into his chest with a frown. It was there at the edge of his memory, hazy with a combination of drugs and fever. Try as he might, he couldn’t make it focus.

Thomas shook his head.

“You thanked her for the lilies,” Abdul prompted.

He sucked in a sharp breath. “Mother Thames was _here_?”

Abdul shrugged. “She paid you a visit. I thought she was going to kill you, but she might actually be a bit fond of you. Thomas?” He leaned forward; Thomas’s face had lost was little colored he’d regained. “Are you alright?”

“Fine,” he whispered. “I’m fine.” The heart monitor behind him momentarily picked up speed before settling again. “Did she – what did she say? Was there an obligation?”

This time it was Abdul’s turn to shake his head. “No. She said there was no obligation.” He relaxed when the set of Thomas’s shoulders did. “You going to be alright if I pop down to my office for a bit?”

Thomas nodded, and fished around for the paperback.

“If you get tired, go ahead a sleep. It’s still the best thing for you.” Abdul stood, hands in his lab coat pockets. “You look much better today.”

He didn’t answer that. Instead, he smiled up at Abdul. “I feel better.”

“Good.” Abdul reached out and ruffled Thomas’s unruly hair. “Be good for the nurses and I’ll be back in a bit.”

Thomas made himself comfortable amongst the blankets and IVs and other medical paraphernalia, and cracked open the paperback with a sigh.

 

Thomas got a little twitchy in the late afternoon, and having no real reason why he couldn’t rest – really _rest_ – at home at the Folly, Abdul processed the paperwork and pulled the blue bag containing his suit and shoes from the closet so he could get dressed.

Abdul and Peter waited in the hallway in order to give him some much needed privacy, and though he was still pale and a bit unsteady on his feet, he looked worlds better than he had a few days prior.

“I’m coming with you,” Abdul said with little in his tone to suggest any wiggle room on the idea. “I’d like to give Molly some instructions.”

Thomas merely nodded, blinking tiredly.

Peter drove the Jag back, the radio playing softly in the background as Thomas dozed. When they got to the Folly, Thomas looked in dire need of a soft, horizontal surface in which to just pass out on. Regardless, he smiled at Molly when she appeared in the atrium from seemingly out of nowhere, and let Abdul herd him up the stairs to his bedroom.

Abdul got him settled, and couldn’t help but notice the tension had finally fully gone from the set of Thomas’s shoulders.

“Good to be home?”

“Very.” Thomas reached a hand out and Abdul wrapped his fingers around his cooler ones. “Thank you, Abdul.”

“You’re quite welcome, Thomas.” He squeezed Thomas’s hand reassuringly, and then tucked it back underneath the pile of sheets and quilt. He listened to Thomas’s breathing even out, and once he was sure his friend was sound asleep, he went back downstairs to impart instructions to Molly and Peter over an evening cup of tea.

**Author's Note:**

> The first chapter is canon compliant. Nightingale has his night of observation in the hospital, and then it can be inferred that he's released and goes back to the Folly. 
> 
> The second chapter is non canon compliant and Thomas gets sicker and earns himself a longer hospital stay, complete with some interesting visitors. If you like your canon compliant, then chapter one is where you'd end. If you don't mind non canon compliant, then carry on to chapter two.
> 
>  
> 
> I'm [over here in this corner of tumblr](http://awonderingsagittarius.tumblr.com/) if you need me.


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